I notice the rectangle has a longer “stick” on the opposite side. I hope this is only to keep the rectangle in place. If so, you could flip the rectangle (and keep it in place with glue perhaps?) and trim the longer stick to a good ratchet length.

I may have it all wrong as it is hard to follow exactly what is going on.

Failing everything else, i would buy a thick enough piece of styrene (or 2 thinner ones for easier cutting and glue them) and recreate the rectangle with longer nubs. It is tough stuff. A stanley knife (or even dremel for the tricky bits) should be all you need and a sheet of styrene will give you many attempts.

__________________

"I am not a gun. I'm hitting people with a hammer. On Mars." The Iron Giant / David Wildgoose

Styrene is not a bad idea. Get the same thickness (depth) as the piece you’re mimicing. You can always make a stronger rachet that way, by altering the thickness of the piece you’re trying to replace. Only problem is that you will likely end up with way more styrene than you need.

I won't quote everybody but essentially I got another grimlock, seems to be a shared issue, what I found was his right leg ratchets (between both copies) was bent in slightly, adding a piece of plastic into the ratchet plastic spring thingie (the original plan to improve the waist ratchet) fixed that without an issue.

Sadly though the waist thing didn't get improved so what damaged it in the end was frustration and something stupid I did, I added plastic behind the ratchet thingie to move the whole thing forward and I noticed I ended up putting the thing in backwards, as noted there are 2 points on this thing with the fatter "stick" meant to hold the ratchet spring thingie in place, without it (because the added plastic blocked the locking hole) the spring thing would shift about preventing the ratchets from doing their job, and the waist ratchet's teeth were getting damaged because of the fatter end I used, I tried to shave it back into place but the damage was done, not only was the original nub damaged because I put it in backwards but the teeth themselves were compromised.

To add insult to injury I couldn't even get the waist to close properly, I even used a vice to hold it together while screwing it together but it would pop open ever so slightly making the waist even worse, so my new grimlock is stock for the time being unless someone has a better less intrusive method to hold it together as I screw it (the vice was bolted down to my old man's work bench, its for heavy duty work so I was just clamping it down opening the vice and then screwing while trying to hold it together, yeah that doesn't sound right does it :S) but I would like to open this one to at least fix that leg because that leg only makes posing even more difficult in combined mode.

Also, no need to be concerned about the cost of the second grimlock, nor sending me spare parts, I have poor modeling skills so fashioning my own stuff isn't an option, its basically hack and slash with a screw driver and jamming stuff into places.

In short the biggest problems was the waist not closing up and requires additional force (I feel that may have contributed to why the additional reinforcement failed) and human error

that's frustrating, someone mentioned having a loose leg on their Grimlock in one of the podcasts I listen to this week as well.

It would take a fair bit of investigation to see what the problem is specifically, is there mould flash somewhere that's effecting the tolerance stack up of the join? perhaps it's something to do with the geometry of the spring. Maybe putting a small piece of soft foam in the gap in the middle of the 'spring' will add enough stiffness to help it work.

I'll be getting a Grimlock at some point and will probably pull it apart to have a look if it's a problem then.